When Bush won 'unexpectedly' in 2004, NYT reporters were reportedly telling each other they didn't even know anyone who voted for Bush. Rush L humorously pointed out that they would have to send "foreign correspondents" out to the heartland to find out what happened.

Let the record reflect that 61 years after the oil discovery the POTH has now sent an opinion reporter out to Williston, North Dakota to file a condescending and derogatory * report on a boom that has the potential to change geo-politics.

I know it was a day trip because the hotels are booked and she certainly doesn't have any friends there.

* "There are certain things that journalists do as a public service because you, the noble reader, are probably not going to do them for yourself — like attending charter revision meetings or reading the autobiography of Tim Pawlenty. Going to Williston is sort of in this category." - Gail Collins, NY Times

"* "There are certain things that journalists do as a public service because you, the noble reader, are probably not going to do them for yourself — like attending charter revision meetings or reading the autobiography of Tim Pawlenty. Going to Williston is sort of in this category." - Gail Collins, NY Times"

Good question Obj (corrupt media comments on Pres 2012 thread) and I'm sure there is no great answer. I resent having to go to right wing sites to get basic news and analysis that should be more widely available. The market is making it's own correction but it's happening too slow and not in the way we might have expected. As you mention, the huge successes of Rush L and Fox News are examples of movement, yet the so-called mainstream seem unchanged in spite of market share they surrender.. Obviously the circulation of stories and facts, opinions and analyses through sites like this is our way of getting the information out.

A Russian immigrant observed that it is worse, in a way, here than in the old Soviet Union with the real Pravda. They have one state run media while we have a whole near-monopoly conspiracy of them, repeating and amplifying a message the rest of us find biased and deceitful.

One of the most insightful feature of the Rush L show now copied by others is the media montage. They aren't just telling the same story, they are using the same words. One of the first I picked up "gravitas" with the Cheney choice for VP. The point of course to them is that is what George Bush lacked at the top of the ticket. That word went from never used to in almost every sentence on every media outlet covering the choice. Since then there have been dozens and dozens more examples. Even Fox News on the radio is a parrot of the other networks IMO. The choice of words covering an issue can be crucial.

Places like Powerline and others take on institutions like the NY Times regularly. They got them today on the flaws in their poll and they've exposed them big time on a host of badly covered topics. Still their readership is small compared to the bankrupting newspaper. They also played a big part in taking down Dan Rather on his 'fake but true' story, but they did not take down the liberal bias of SeeBS. Microsoft pulled back from MSNBC.com but that didn't change the bias on cable. My thought was that these exposures of bias caused errors would lead to a shake up and a correction. Instead they take pride in their niche while their importance is diminishing.

I used to write opposition pieces for the local paper; my counterpoint ran across from the Mpls StarTribune (star and sickle) endorsement of Bill Clinton in 92. In their editing, they cut a key paragraph that tied in with other points I was making. After that I wrote 'no editing without my permission' on subsequent submissions and was never published there again.

Other conservatives advise not to write for them at all. Don't help them improve their product. Let it die and the best way to make them go away is to ignore them completely and get news from better sources.

I like to search for stories of interest from the accumulator sites, Real Clear Politics is one of the best, also Drudge, The Blaze, Free Republic and DBMA. ) Google News allows you to choose which outlet to read a current story. Powerlineblog keeps a running referral to about 6 picks of noteworthy stories current on the web. WSJ's James Taranto writes a Best of the Web piece every business afternoon, no subscription required, with excellent insights and humor. Add in the Huffington Post, might as well turn to left instead of pretend mainstream to know what they are thinking and reading. It is important to see and read the opponents in their own words, so don't leave those out no matter your view.

Seriously this forum is an excellent antidote because the posters here all share from their own unique reading lists on a wide range of topics and issues.

Americans keep behaving in ways that baffle the liberal mainstream media. Two examples figured prominently -- or should have -- in last week's news.

One is the runoff primary for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Texas. Former state Solicitor General Ted Cruz thumped incumbent Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, 57 to 43 percent.

Cruz won even though the Texas Republican establishment, from Gov. Rick Perry on down, endorsed Dewhurst. So did the Austin lobbying community, since Dewhurst as lieutenant governor has run the state Senate for the last 10 years (and, having lost this race, will do so for at least the next two).

Dewhurst has had a generally conservative record and had no problem getting elected and re-elected statewide four times. And he spent liberally from the fortune he made in the private sector.

To be fair, some MSM outlets did run stories on Cruz's rise in the polls since he ran behind Dewhurst by a 45 to 34 percent margin in the May 29 primary. And it's not uncommon for a second-place finisher to overcome the primary winner in a runoff.

But there's a pattern here that the big liberal press has been reluctant to recognize: Candidates from the GOP establishment are getting knocked off by challengers with less name recognition, far less money and the support of the tea party movement. The tea party was supposed to be dead and gone, you know.

There were two such victories in May, when six-term Sen. Richard Lugar was upset by state Treasurer Richard Mourdock in Indiana and when state Sen. Deb Fischer beat two well-known contenders for the open seat nomination in Nebraska.

Cruz, who is the odds-on favorite in November, has the credentials and policy positions to be a figure of national importance for many years. At 41, he could represent the second-largest state in the Senate for decades.

And there's a tradition of Texas senators taking the lead in public policy, from the days of Tom Connally and Lyndon Johnson and including John Tower, Lloyd Bentsen and Phil Gramm.

Cruz has a fine legal pedigree. He was a law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and argued nine cases (and won five) in the U.S. Supreme Court representing Texas. As a teenager, he memorized and gave lectures on the Constitution, and on the stump he emphasized the founding document's limits on the power of government.

The big media has assumed that tea partiers are potentially violent despite the lack of evidence of any violent behavior. That's why ABC's Brian Ross mentioned on-air an Aurora, Colo., tea partier with the same name as the movie theater murderer, although it's a common name and Aurora has 325,000 people.

In contrast, the MSM has been happy to celebrate the much smaller and often violent Occupy movement and characterize it as "mostly nonviolent."

Texas showed once again that many voters are eager to turn out and vote for tea party-backed candidates. Cruz won by about 2 to 1 in fast-growing exurban counties in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and metro Houston.

There were big crowds, long drive-up lines and record sales at the chain's stores, in response to the declarations by the mayors of Chicago, Boston and Washington that they would keep the restaurant out because of its owners' opposition to same-sex marriage.

That's not "Chicago values," said Mayor Rahm Emanuel, although there are many Chicagoans on both sides of this issue, just as many are on both sides, in varying proportions, throughout the country. But even many supporters of same-sex marriage like me were appalled at the spectacle of public officials barring businesses because of the religious or political beliefs of their owners.

In Huntsville, Ala., YouTube celebrity Antoine Dodson, who is openly gay, dined at Chick-fil-A on Wednesday. "That's what freedom is. We don't all have to believe in the same things," he told a Huntsville Times reporter.

"We all have our different beliefs and can still come together and still be friends and be cool with each other," he said. "So I'm here to be in support of the employees, and I'm also coming to get that spicy chicken sandwich."

Dodson presumably is not an expert on the Constitution like Ted Cruz. But he has something to teach the liberal mainstream media about the spirit of the Founders.

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

In the 19th-century fairy tale "The Adventures of Pinocchio," the eponymous protagonist is a wooden puppet who dreams of becoming an actual boy. We suppose people who work as fact checkers have long dreamed of becoming writers and editors, who enjoy, respectively, the glory and the power in journalism.

Associated Press/Sven KaestnerThe new face of journalism? .Outside the world of journalism, fact checkers were pretty much unknown until recently. Like proofreaders, they work behind the scenes. Their job is quality control. The most rigorous fact-checking operations--The New Yorker's and Reader's Digest's are the best known among us who know about such things--would scrutinize every factual assertion in an article, reporting back so that any error could be corrected.

Over the past few years, many organizations have promoted "fact checkers" by making them writers, or perhaps demoted writers by making them fact checkers. No, it's more the former, because other writers have been bowing to the "fact checkers" as submissively as Barack Obama upon meeting some anti-American dictator.

"Fact-checker findings, including those by The Washington Post's project, figure prominently in campaign ads," enthuses a Post news story. "The unique rating systems used by these organizations--including the trademarked Truth-O-Meter and Pinocchios--have become part of the political vernacular." A New York Times news story laments that fact checkers "verdicts . . . are often drowned out by dissent."

Perhaps the reason other journalists are so deferential toward the "fact checkers" is that these fact checkers, unlike the traditional ones, don't check the facts of journalists but of politicians. By and large, they aren't actually checking facts but making and asserting judgments about the veracity of politicians' arguments.

The quality of their work is generally quite poor. "The MSM's ['mainstream' media's] fact-checkers often don't know what they're talking about," notes Mickey Kaus, who cites an example on a subject he knows well:

The oft-cited CNN-"fact check" of Romney's welfare ad makes a big deal of HHS secretary [Kathleen] Sebelius' pledge that she will only grant waivers to states that "commit that their proposals will move at least 20% more people from welfare to work." CNN swallows this 20% Rule whole in the course of declaring Romney's objection "wrong":

"The waivers gave 'those states some flexibility in how they manage their welfare rolls as long as it produced 20% increases in the number of people getting work.' "

Why, it looks as if Obama wants to make the work provisions tougher! Fact-check.org cites the same 20% rule.

I was initially skeptical of Sebelius' 20% pledge, since a) it measures the 20% against "the state's past performance," not what the state's performance would be if it actually tried to comply with the welfare law's requirements as written, and b) Sebelius pulled it out of thin air only after it became clear that the new waiver rule could be a political problem for the president. She could just as easily drop it in the future; and c) Sebelius made it clear the states don't have to actually achieve the 20% goal--only "demonstrate clear progress toward" it.

But Robert Rector, a welfare reform zealot who nevertheless does know what he's talking about, has now published a longer analysis of the 20% rule. Turns out it's not as big a scam as I'd thought it was. It's a much bigger scam.

The merits of the argument are beyond the scope of today's column. It is quite possible that there are people whose knowledge of the subject is as deep as Kaus's and Rector's but whose honest interpretation is more favorable to the Sebelius position. An appeal to their authority could carry as much weight as our appeal to Kaus's and Rector's.

But an appeal to the authority of "independent fact checkers" carries no weight at all. In case you're skeptical of this assertion, let's look at some other examples of their output from the past week.

RYAN: "And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly. . . . So they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama."

THE FACTS: Ryan's claim ignores the fact that Ryan himself incorporated the same cuts into budgets he steered through the House in the past two years as chairman of its Budget Committee. . . .

RYAN: "The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare and cronyism at their worst. You, the working men and women of this country, were cut out of the deal."

THE FACTS: Ryan himself asked for stimulus funds shortly after Congress approved the $800 billion plan.

In both of these cases, the AP neither disputes nor verifies the factual accuracy of Ryan's statements. Each of these is simply a tu quoque--an argument against Ryan. Under the guise of fact checking, the AP is simply taking sides in a partisan political dispute.

The most disputed portion of Ryan's speech involved the closing of a General Motors plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wis. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal Friday defended Ryan's account against "the press corps 'fact checkers' and the liberals who love them."

But even the so-called fact checkers can't agree on the facts. PolitiFact rated Ryan's account "false," while CNN.com called it "true but incomplete." Anyone who really believes in the authority of "fact checkers" has a liar's paradox problem.

Sometimes the so-called checks are just red herrings. Here's an example from ABC News:

In comparing President Obama to Jimmy Carter, Ryan said in July 1980 the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent and "for the past 42 months it's been above 8 percent under Barack Obama's failed leadership."

Both parts of this sentence are true according to the Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, but in July 1983, when Ronald Reagan was president, unemployment was at 9.4 percent. In July 1982 it was higher at 9.8 percent.

In July 1992, when George H.W. Bush was president, unemployment was at 7.7 percent.

Is what Ryan said factually correct? Yes, but it leaves out some important data.

Ryan compared Obama to Carter. AP thinks he should also (or instead) have compared Obama to Reagan and Bush. There is no factual dispute here whatever.

Sometimes the "fact checkers" are ignorant even of facts that, in contrast with the welfare material above, require no special expertise to know. This is from a CNN.com "fact check":

In a new policy paper, his Republican rival for the White House, Mitt Romney, says, "President Obama has intentionally sought to shut down oil, gas, and coal production in pursuit of his own alternative energy agenda." . . .

Obama has, for sure, angered some oil and coal producers by steering federal money to alternative energy sources. But there is no evidence that he is trying to "shut down" traditional energy industries.

No evidence? How about Obama's own words? "So, if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them, because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted."

ROMNEY: "I have a plan to create 12 million new jobs. It has five steps."

THE FACTS: No one says he can't, but economic forecasters are divided on his ability to deliver. He'd have to nearly double the anemic pace of job growth lately.

This is like "fact checking" somebody's wedding vows by asserting that while marriage can be wonderful, it's hard work and ends in divorce half the time.

Among "fact checkers," the worst of a bad lot may be the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler. On Thursday afternoon he actually wrote a post called "Previewing the 'Facts' in Mitt Romney's Acceptance Speech." With those scare quotes, he declared the Republican nominee a liar before Romney had even opened his mouth.

Conservative blogger Stacy McCain describes "the pattern for Republican National Convention coverage: Democrats choose their themes, issue their talking points and their media henchpersons then repeat the partisan spin as if it were a matter of indisputable fact." Kessler didn't wait; he wrote the talking points himself.

The usual conservative complaint about all this "fact checking" is the same as the conservative complaint about the MSM's product in general: that it is overwhelmingly biased toward the left. But the form amplifies the bias. It gives journalists much freer rein to express their opinions by allowing them to pretend to be rendering authoritative judgments about the facts. The result, as we've seen, is shoddy arguments and shoddier journalism.

The partisan fault-finding directed against Republicans is accompanied by partisan excuse-making for Democrats. Thus ABCNews.com tries yet again to rationalize away Obama's most notorious presidential utterance:

Greeting Air Force One as it touched down [in Iowa] under sunny skies and sultry heat was a hand-painted banner draped across the top of an airplane hangar that reads, "Obama Welcome to SUX--We Did Build This." "SUX" is the airport code for Sioux City.

The message appeared to be a response President Obama's "you didn't build that" remark from a July campaign rally, when he was trying to explain that government--not businesses--constructed public infrastructure on which the economy relies.

"Obama is casting his net for the moron vote," wrote R. Emmett Tyrrell in a recent column. "I do not believe that there are enough morons out there to reelect him." But if ABC is right that Obama found it necessary to "explain" that government builds "public infrastructure," the president is also making a play for the idiot vote.

Bad journalism feeds into ever-more-extreme rhetoric from the left. "Last night, Paul Ryan lied to the American people," wrote Brenda Witt of MoveOn.org in a Thursday email. "Some journalists and outlets covered Ryan's lies. But others failed to check the facts and didn't call Ryan out on his brazen lies." The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Greetings from the California delegation breakfast at the DNC where before he had a cup of coffee Democratic Party Chair John Burton--much like his ol' palGuv Jerry Brown once did--just compared the Republicans to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, for "telling the big lie," a reference to several [putative] falsehoods GOP VP nominee Paul Ryan recently told.

"They lie and they don't care if people think they lie . . . Joseph Goebbels--it's the big lie, you keep repeating it," Burton said Monday before the Blake Hotel breakfast. He said Ryan told "a bold-faced lie and he doesn't care that it was a lie. That was Goebbels, the big lie."

You see the progression. Journalists claiming to be engaged in "fact checking" make tendentious arguments against Republicans. Left-wing partisans rely on the authority of the "fact checkers" to call their opponents liars or even Nazis.

One gets a sense of desperation from both the Democrats, who are trying to re-elect a president with a lousy record, and the MSM, who are trying to restore the authority they enjoyed when they aspired to objectivity, or at least pretended convincingly to do so.

Obama may yet eke out an ugly victory, but the decline of the MSM's authority seems inexorable. And it's not only "fact checkers" who are acting like out-and-out partisans. Time's Joe Klein is "the Pope of American political journalists" according to the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur. RealClearPolitics notes an ex cathedra pronouncement he made the other day when he granted an audience to the New York Times's Helene Cooper:

Cooper: Four years of covering Barack Obama, he does not play the race card. Not in a negative way. He does not do that.

Klein: He hates it. He hates it. He probably should, though. He probably should address it because the bitterness out there is really becoming marked.

Some may dispute Cooper's claim that Obama doesn't "play the race card." But Klein's assertion that he "probably should" is really quite stunning. It's almost certainly bad advice. Indeed, we'd say following it in 2008 would have been one of the few ways he could have lost to John McCain. Successful or not, the attempt to foment racial division would be as repugnant coming from a black leftist as from a white conservative.

Above all, though: What in the world is a journalist doing offering such rancid advice? In general terms, the same thing all those "fact checkers" are doing. Also the same thing journalists did when they slandered the Tea Party as racist, and when they wrote puff pieces about ObamaCare and insisted the public would learn to love it, and when they falsely blamed conservatives for the Tucson massacre.

During the Obama era, so-called mainstream journalism has increasingly been characterized by a blurring of the distinction between not only fact and opinion but opinion and propaganda. One can only hope the audience sees matters more clearly

This AM obama's surrogate Fareed Zakaria is twisting the arguments ass backwards and saying the Republicans, and conservatives are angry at America.

It is all "nostalgia" which is the liberal's new way of saying the Republicans just are white male racists who want white supremacy.

He had a bunch of liberal friends from Harvard (of course or Princeton of course) to advance his case.

The liberals will not cease to make this into a race baiting election.

My answer is if the right was about nostalgia for slavery or segregation than why are we trying as hard as possible to include as many minorities as possible.

Romney has to make the case it is the left that hates American ideals, hates American exceptionalism, capatilism, constitutionalism, and limited government. With regard to the latter MR and conservatives continue to fail to make the case that less government is better.

Today Art Laffler was on FOX and was asked specifically and directly an important question that goes to the heart of today's neo civil war.

He was asked why is should people believe that "trickle down" economics is better for the majority of people? Do not the rich keep getting richer and the rest of the people stagnate? Why not increase tax rates on higher earners, Clinton did it and the economy boomed. Laffler was a complete failure at articulating a logical rational simple response that most people would agree to.

I gaurantee Doug McG would do a far better job at answering these questions ina way the average could understand and immediately agree to.

I do not understand why these core questions are not being answered by the MR team. All they do is talk "jobs", the "debt", and other buzz words that DO NOT specify why history proves them/us rright and the socialists wrong.

If they can learn to answer these types of questions then the game is won. If not we wiol contine to have fecnce sitters who will decide the safer course is government handouts and wealth transfer.

I second Crafty's surprise. Rivera has seen virtually EVERYTHING through a racist prism as long as I can remember. He vehemently defended Bill Clinton during the impeachment, then was surprised later when Clinton threw him under the bus and wouldn't give him the time of day. When Rivera was hired at Fox a few years ago, the network received thousands of letters/e-mails from viewers outraged that they would hire this pathetic excuse for a journalist. The man is a fool.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

In polling, the media is the story unless you think there is some science to slop like this. Most dramatic of the latest false polls, NY Times and See-BS are putting their names on polls that put Obama up by 10 in Ohio. Obama is going to win in 2012 by a margin of 5 times what he had in the euphoria of 2008? And the margin of error is what, 3%? Ha ha.

Was there any adjustment made after all t he polls were wrong in Wisconsin by 6 points, any change to the turnout model after Obama's party lost by 7 points nationwide in 2010? I don't think so.

Romney is leading by 10 with independents, has stronger enthusiasm from his base and will lose the election and closest states by 10 or more??

Instead of arguing the internals, let's just watch and see. The election is soon enough. Watch them tighten up their own results just before the election as the last one is the only one for which anyone can measure accuracy. Meanwhile, this crap will linger as the rest of the media follows the poll averages in measurfes like the RCP average. Readers and viewers should walk away from these failed brands, unless what they print you think is the unbiased truth. Lol.

In polling, the media is the story unless you think there is some science to slop like this. Most dramatic of the latest false polls, NY Times and See-BS are putting their names on polls that put Obama up by 10 in Ohio. Obama is going to win in 2012 by a margin of 5 times what he had in the euphoria of 2008? And the margin of error is what, 3%? Ha ha.

Was there any adjustment made after all t he polls were wrong in Wisconsin by 6 points, any change to the turnout model after Obama's party lost by 7 points nationwide in 2010? I don't think so.

Romney is leading by 10 with independents, has stronger enthusiasm from his base and will lose the election and closest states by 10 or more??

Instead of arguing the internals, let's just watch and see. The election is soon enough. Watch them tighten up their own results just before the election as the last one is the only one for which anyone can measure accuracy. Meanwhile, this crap will linger as the rest of the media follows the poll averages in measurfes like the RCP average. Readers and viewers should walk away from these failed brands, unless what they print you think is the unbiased truth. Lol.

The Five False Assumptions Behind Poll-SkewingSeptember 27, 2012 - 11:20 am - by Zombie Polls polls polls polls polls. In the weeks leading up to a presidential election, that’s all anyone talks about. Polls subsume all other news: Every soundbite, disaster, current event, policy, gaffe, decision and incident are merely vectors in pollspace, data which may or may not nudge the candidates’ numbers up or down a notch.

Therefore he who controls the polls can retroactively control everything that happens: Any event or utterance can be afterward spun as wonderful or ruinous if you can demonstrate that the subsequent poll showed a bounce or a dip. Polls are seen as irrefutable ex post facto evidence that a slanted news report was in fact accurate: “See? You complained when we quickly labeled the candidate’s joke as a ‘gaffe,’ but this new poll shows he dropped three points, so that proves it really was a gaffe.”

As a result, the 2012 presidential campaign is paralleled by a surrogate Poll War enjoined by each side’s supporters in the punditocracy. Whatever else happens in real life, the partisans are in an endless down-and-dirty mud-wrestling match over the veracity and reliability of polls.

The Purpose of Poll-Skewing

Each side has defined for itself an ultimate goal. Obama’s supporters in the media and online strive incessantly to demonstrate and publicize that Obama is ahead in the polls. Romney’s supporters strive to demonstrate that those polls are skewed, since the published totals are “weighted” (i.e. arbitrarily distorted) to match statistics about past voter behavior that are no longer true.

Now, if you had just landed on Earth from another galaxy, you likely would be very confused about this behavior on the part of the poll-wrestlers. Presuming there is such a thing as objective reality, there must be a certain true percentage of people who support each candidate — so what purpose is served by intentionally misrepresenting that reality if, at the end of the campaign, that misrepresentation will be trumped by an actual vote? Isn’t the purpose of polls to reveal a snapshot of how things really stand?

Oh you naive extraterrestrials, we reply. Originally, yes, polls were meant to document reality, but nowadays polls are designed to mold reality. If two candidates are in truth currently tied, but we announce that one of them is in the lead, then on election day he will actually win, because our false poll reporting affected how people vote. Get it?

Amateur Mass Psychology

No, actually, I don’t get it. This entire strategy, which dominates the 2012 election even more than it dominated earlier campaigns, is based on some amateurish assumptions about mass psychology that have never been proven, or even tested. I find it extremely odd that no one has ever questioned these assumptions — until now, at least — because so much depends on them. What if it turns out, after endless person-hours expended on the Poll Wars, that the assumptions justifying poll-skewing are completely wrong?

For poll-skewing to be effective, all five of the following hidden assumptions about human psychology must be true:

ASSUMPTION #1

• When a person sees that his team is in second place, he gives up and stops fighting.

Perhaps I’m different from everyone else on Earth. Maybe I’ve got grit that everyone else lacks. But when I see myself behind in an ongoing competition, I redouble my efforts in an attempt to win.

But I don’t really think I’m different at all. I think most people react exactly as I do. In fact, personnel managers often rely on this common behavioral trait to motivate employees by pitting them against each other and then implying to each one that if only he tried a little bit harder he would surpass all the other employees and win the promotion. The end result is that each employee, thinking his promotion is in danger, works more energetically to achieve hoped-for victory.

Here’s an example. Let’s just say that in some battleground state Obama and Romney are essentially tied in the raw polling data, but in an attempt to “depress the vote” among Romney supporters the media and partisan pollsters intentionally skew the results and announce that Obama is actually up by three points. What would be the group psychology consequence of this false announcement?

The Obama partisans assume that Romney supporters will see the false Romney-is-losing poll results, get discouraged, and say to themselves, “Gee, looks like Romney is going to lose. There’s no point in voting for him. I give up. I’m not going to vote on election day.” And then Obama really would win by three points.

Now to me, that would be a bizarre and unlikely reaction. I would assume the exact opposite — that the Romney supporters would become unnecessarily alarmed at such a poll result and as a consequence would fight harder for their candidate: “Gee, Romney is trailing at the polls: I’d better go volunteer at the campaign office and make sure all my fellow Republicans vote with me on election day to help Romney pass Obama at the finish line.” And the consequence would be that Romney won by three points.

So: We have two competing assumptions, one (held by most Democratic strategists) that skewed poll results will discourage opposition voters, and one (held by me) that skewed poll results will energize opposition voters.

Surely, there is some evidence, some study, supporting one assumption over the other — right? Well, as far as I can tell, no, there isn’t. For this entire campaign season I’ve searched in vain for some kind of verification that the unquestioned assumptions underlying the “depress the vote” strategy are even true. But no one’s ever done such a study, and I doubt any strategists have ever spent two seconds questioning their assumptions about mass psychology.

And how would such a study be conducted? It’s not like a pollster can ask voters, “If your favorite candidate was actually ahead in popularity, but the only way you could know this fact was from the results of polls, and if then a pollster like me intentionally lied and told you that your candidate was actually losing, would the deception work on you and cause you to become discouraged and not vote at all?” I’d imagine that the pollster would get a punch in the nose rather than a well-reasoned answer.

But if there’s no data to support the assumptions behind the “depress the vote” strategy, then who’s to say whether the assumption is correct? Simply because more people have that assumption? And how do we prove that? Do we take a poll of people about their group psychology assumptions? “Do you assume that falsely distorted poll results will depress votes for a candidate or energize his supporters?” And what if those poll results are themselves skewed? Where does it end?

And so we come to an astonishing conclusion: That thousands of campaign strategists for decades have been operating on an assumption that has never been confirmed, and that for all anyone knows the exact opposite could be true — that poll results skewed against a candidate only end up energizing his supporters and increasing his final vote tally.

ASSUMPTION #2

• People’s desire to be part of the “in crowd” is much stronger than any political philosophy they may have.

The next assumption justifying skewed poll reporting is that people’s fear of being perceived as an “outsider” or member of a losing faction outweighs their political beliefs. Thus, people will flippantly switch votes to whichever candidate is likely to win merely so as to then feel like part of the “winning team.” If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Is this assumption accurate? I can’t say for sure. There probably are some people who are so shallow, so obsessed with social maneuvering and so despicable that they will side with the perceived majority in any situation, even if it entails utter hypocrisy and moral vacuity. But do such people even bother to vote? It’s hard to visualize such a person, but I imagine they’re more concerned about what eye-shadow Kim Kardashian wears than they are about the fate of civilization.

Furthermore, it seems more and more, especially in the last four years, that the opposing political factions have hardened, the fissure between them has deepened, and rarely these days does anyone say the once-common refrain “There’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats.” Consequently, it has become much more difficult to casually switch camps, because now that involves flipping from one political extreme to another, rather than (as it used to be seen) choosing between two very similar options.

Flip-floppers and fair-weather vote traitors are a dying breed. Are they common enough to affect the result of a national election by voting for Obama simply because they were tricked into thinking he was guaranteed to win? Quite doubtful. I have no hard statistics on the rarity of flippant vote-switchers, but then again nor do the strategists laboring overtime to deceive them. Are those labors all a grand waste of time?

ASSUMPTION #3

• The liberal media can communicate directly to their conservative opponents with reverse dog whistles, while winking to Obama voters that they should ignore the lies.

The American left is obsessed with the concept of the “dog whistle,” an imaginary mode of communication in which conservative speakers, addressing a general audience, use secret code words to convey racist sentiments to fellow racist conservatives, which the rest of the audience presumably doesn’t notice (except for those too-clever Dog Whistle Detectives who spot racist code words in every Republican utterance).

Dog Whistle Code is actually an interesting logical problem: How can you embed a specialized message for a specific target audience in a communiqué that is broadcast to the general public? Long gone are the days when anyone could keep narrowcasting private; now, if you try to give a partisan message to a partisan audience, it will inevitably leak out to a shocked world. Therefore every utterance must be presumed to be broadcast generally, and any messages targeted at a specific subgroup must be secretly incorporated into a statement everyone can hear.

But the situation becomes doubly difficult when your target audience is not your close political comrades but rather your ideological opponents. But that’s exactly what the Obama-loving media is trying to do.

The goal of generating and promulgating skewed poll results is to (theoretically) depress and discourage Republican voters; but there is an unwanted side-effect that the media wishes to avoid: Inducing complacency on the part of Obama voters.

If you assume that a conservative activist will give up hope and stop fighting when he learns that his candidate is losing by a wide margin, then you necessarily will also assume that the reverse is true as well: That an opposing liberal activist will become lax, over-confident and complacent when he sees that his candidate is winning by a wide margin.

The corollary of “Dang it, my guy is losing by a wide margin, so there’s no point in voting” is “Yay! My guy is winning easily, so there’s no need to vote.”

So when the pro-Obama media and supporting punditocracy trumpet a new skewed poll, the hope is that conservatives will see it and become disheartened; while liberals are supposed to see it and understand (wink wink) that it’s a lie directed at someone else, which they should therefore ignore.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happens. If anything, Obama supporters seem to lap up and internalize the “Obama will win effortlessly” meme far more eagerly and unquestioningly than Romney supporters, who have become jaundiced and distrustful of anything the media does.

The end result is that for every Romney voter who stays home because he was tricked into thinking his vote will be futile in a sea of Obama votes, there may very well be an equal number of Obama voters who stay home because they were incidentally tricked into thinking their votes are unnecessary since Obama will win in a landslide.

And once again, I don’t have statistics for this, but neither do the Democratic strategists, because it’s basically impossible to poll future non-voters about why they will fail to vote. For all anyone knows, there will be five Obama voters who stay home out of over-confidence and complacency for every Romney voter who stays home out of depression.

ASSUMPTION #4

• Low-information undecided voters in swing states pay attention to the news, current events and polls.

As I noted in my previous essay, the few remaining undecided voters are the kind of people who would rather watch reruns of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” than live broadcasts of the Democratic and Republican party conventions. They have absolutely zero interest in politics.

This impression was confirmed by some man-on-street interviews with random New York voters which Howard Stern recently broadcast on his radio show. The interviewees were breathtakingly ignorant, had only the vaguest notion of who was even running for President, and agreed with any statement the interviewers made, including that Romney was Muslim, that Obama had picked Paul Ryan as his running mate, that John McCain was the 2012 Republican nominee, and so forth.

The Honey Boo Boo viewers and the New York morons, along with many of the other low-information voters around the country, don’t follow the ups and downs of daily polling; most of them probably don’t even know there is an election coming up. Heck, most of them probably can’t even read. They are, in essence, unreachable.

Low-Information Undecideds never notice the details: all they can perceive is the general atmosphere. Thus, the interview subjects in New York all said they were voting for Obama, not because of any reason they could name, but simply because they were in New York and in New York everybody votes for Obama. And I’m quite sure that if one went to certain counties in Texas one could find people planning to vote Republican for no other reason than it’s what “everybody does.”

So the pollsters reason: If we can create that atmosphere of Obama’s inevitable victory and universal popularity, then we can “convince” Low-Information Undecideds to vote for Obama simply because they will be mimicking what they think everyone else is doing.

But there’s a flaw in this plan. Swing states and battleground states are defined as such for a reason: They are evenly split between Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative. There is no overarching political culture that dominates the atmosphere, as there is in (for example) San Francisco, or Provo, Utah.

Therefore the task confronting partisan pollsters in swing states is almost insurmountable: Create the false impression that Obama is overwhelmingly popular in an area where he is in fact not. It’s next to impossible to fabricate a Potemkin Village of widespread pro-Obama enthusiasm visible only to people notorious for not paying any attention. If Low-Information Undecideds merely ape what their neighbors do, in a swing state half those neighbors are going to be Republicans and half are going to be Democrats, and no amount of skewed polling can disguise that fact.

ASSUMPTION #5

• Polling companies need to be accurate in order to gain a reputation for reliability, so they have no motivation to lie.

This assumption, which the pollsters hope the public has, is partly true. A reputation for accuracy is one way for a polling company to attract clients.

But polling companies have a second motivation often at odds with and usually trumping the desire for accuracy: To give their clients (in this instance, political campaigns) what they want.

Want to see a poll that shows you’re winning (so you can use those false stats to sway the electorate?) You got it!

Want us to weight the results so that opposing voters become too despondent to bother voting? You got it!

Want evidence that you were in the lead so that when when voter fraud propels you to otherwise undeserved victory, it looks believable? You got it!

Campaigns will seek out any pollster who can provide them with the propaganda necessary to manipulate the election. Accuracy is only useful for secret internal polls; intentionally deceptive skewing is useful as tool to trick voters.

Some voters have figured this out, and now place more trust in the campaign’s secret internal polls than they do in publicly announced polls. But outsiders rarely get a glimpse of those secret internal polls unless they’re intentionally leaked. Diabolical campaign managers have begun to realize that they can also sway those hard-to-discourage skeptical voters by “leaking” supposedly reliable internal polling numbers which support their propagandistic goal; and since the polls are secret, there’s no expectation to release the underlying breakdowns, so the propagandists are free to concoct and release any “internal polling numbers” they so desire.

All in all, the polling industry has just as much if not more structural motivation for corruption as it has for honesty, so we can’t rely on the “marketplace” to weed out biased polls.

Conclusion

Five assumptions. Never questioned. All or most of them need to be true for poll-skewing to be effective. And yet under closer inspection none of them are proven to be true. On the other hand, there’s no solid evidence that they’re false, either; it’s all a guessing game of untested hypotheses. From my vantage point, which in the absence of any solid data is as valid as anyone else’s, many of the assumptions are not only false but they are inverted: The exact opposite assumption is more likely to be true.

Campaign strategists and their poll-skewing accomplices may be shooting themselves in the foot every single day by jumping to unproven conclusions about mass psychology. For all they know, every action they take backfires, and helps the opposition.

But they can’t be bothered by doubts. Merrily they skew and skew, convinced of their cunning.

For all of the wishful thinking in the mainstream press about President Obama’s positioning 40 days before this election, Obama’s approval rating looks remarkably similar to what it was on this date in 2010 — shortly before his party lost a historic 63 House seats and 6 Senate seats. On September 27, 2010 — exactly two years ago — Rasmussen Reports showed Obama’s net approval rating among likely voters to be minus-3 percentage points (with 48 percent approving and 51 percent disapproving). Among those who felt “strongly,” Obama’s net approval rating was minus-14 points (with 27 percent “strongly” approving and 41 percent “strongly” disapproving).

Today, Rasmussen Reports shows Obama’s net approval rating among likely voters to be minus-3 points (with 48 percent approving and 51 percent disapproving). Among those who feel “strongly,” Obama’s net approval rating is minus-14 points (with 28 percent “strongly” approving and 42 percent “strongly” disapproving). So, two years after the biggest Republican gains in the House since before World War II, Americans remain every bit as unimpressed with the way Obama is handling his job as president as they were then.This stands to reason. Obamacare remains an unprecedented threat to Americans’ liberty, this “recovery” still feels like a recession, the debt continues to explode, and Obama still ducks responsibility for anything that happens during his presidency, at least to some degree. The American people are noticing.

E@mtapscott If I've said it once, I've said it hundreds of times, especially when talking with young people thinking about becoming journalists: Journalism is a proud profession because it is the first line of liberty's defense.

Journalists have a constitutional license to shine light in the dark places of government. That's the main reason I love my job and cannot imagine myself doing anything else.

It's too bad the majority of Americans don't trust journalists. Even more distressing, though, is the fact that most of the editors, reporters, producers and researchers who occupy journalism's commanding heights don't seem to have a clue about why their work lacks credibility.

How do I know that? Well, let's do an experiment. Here are two important stories on issues of vital national importance, but you aren't likely to hear much about them if you depend upon the broadcast networks and big national dailies for your news. That's because both stories cut across the conventional wisdom that suffocates independent thinking in the leading newsrooms.

The first story concerns electric vehicles, or EVs, which are assumed to be the wave of the green future. EVs cannot now and aren't likely any time soon to offer more comfort or convenience at less cost to consumers than conventional internal-combustion cars and trucks.

Even so, the federal government has spent billions of dollars in the past two decades on research, loans and tax credits to encourage automakers to sell more EVs and consumers to buy them. But consumers avoid EVs like the plague.

As a result, Toyota, which two years ago confidently predicted it would soon be selling thousands of EVs, reversed course this week, with a senior executive saying "the current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society's needs, whether it may be the distance the cars can run, or the costs, or how it takes a long time to charge."

Search the websites of the New York Times and Washington Post for coverage of Toyota's decision, and you'll likely find only blog notes buried deep within. The broadcast networks similarly ignored the story.

The second story concerns something else the federal government has spent billions of tax dollars on in the past two decades in the form of research, loans and tax credits to encourage, namely, construction of affordable housing for the poor.

Chicago's ShoreBank was for many years the nation's largest community bank, specializing in funding affordable housing developments and mortgages. It was also the 2008 Obama presidential campaign's bank. ShoreBank went under two years ago.

Former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chairwoman Sheila Bair told the American Banker this week that ShoreBank failed in part due to mismanagement caused by partisan politics.

She also said the otherwise admirable commitment of the bank's owners and managers to encouraging more affordable housing in Chicago resulted in it "going astray" and "relying too much on its cachet and glamorous reputation among liberal groups and did not focus enough on the basics of running a bank."

Bair's comments come hard on the heels of The Washington Examiner's exclusive report last week laying out President Obama's central role in leading Chicago's liberal activists to unite with greedy developers and the city's corrupt political machine in spending hundreds of millions of public dollars and tax credits on failed affordable housing developments.

The Times and Post will probably give decent coverage to Bair's new book in which she discusses ShoreBank and other issues. But don't hold your breathe waiting for them to connect the dots to the Examiner's reporting on Obama's role in these matters.

And they will still wonder why they're held in such low regard by the public.

I mentioned in another post that all polls for MN governor in 2010 including the final poll were off by 12 points. In Wisconsin this year they missed by 7. I thought the margin for sampling error was 3%, lol. Strangely those misses are about the range that Obama was leading Romney in key swing states in some outrageous recent polls.

One theory advanced is that the biased media and polling organizations want to effect turnout to swing the election with skewed polls. But a wide margin could sabotage turnout on the leader more than it does on the angry opposition, so that doesn't make any sense.

My theory now is right back to GM's theory on every other strategy in the Obama campaign. The polls results are concocted to fit the shiny object theory - HEY, look at this SHINY OBJECT, over HERE!! Take your eyes off the unemployment rate, the debt and the 24 year old in your basement for a minute, here is a shiny object!

The false polls give the Romney campaign has taken on a new first name, the struggling Romney campaign. Ask David Gregory, he gets it into the first sentence:

Announcer: From NBC News in Washington, MEET THE PRESS with David Gregory.

GREGORY: And good Sunday morning. With both sides in full-preparation mode for Wednesday’s first presidential debate, the struggling Romney campaign is recalibrating his message...-------------------

Unmentioned: There has been a 36 point enthusiasm swing from Democrats to Republicans since the 2008 election to today according to the latest Gallup. Dems +20 2008, Even 2010, R's +16% now. Everybody knows this of course because USA Today put it on page 13.------------------

Polls all admit applying their own secret sauce to get the right samples and results. Unskewedpolls.com removes the skew back to best known party affiliation numbers and has Romney leading by 7.4%. http://unskewedpolls.com/

Obama’s Boys on the BusThe media pull out all the stops to reelect the president. Oct 15, 2012, Vol. 18, No. 05 •

Fred Barnes

The Time cover story last week was headlined “The Mormon Identity.” The cover, featuring Mitt Romney in a stained-glass window, said in smaller type, “What Mitt Romney’s faith tells us about his vision and values.” Newsweek had President Obama on the cover, identifying him as “The Democrats’ Reagan” and heralding the story inside as “What Obama Will Achieve in His Second Term.”

Neither of the stories, to put it mildly, was helpful to Romney’s presidential campaign. The piece in Time was fair, but the timing, long after Mormonism had faded as a factor in the election, was suspect. In Newsweek, Obama was lionized, while Romney and Republicans were treated like hyperpartisan right-wingers.

My point in citing the newsmagazines is not that they’re colluding to reelect Obama. They don’t have to. It comes quite naturally to these pillars of the mainstream media to elevate issues with a pro-Obama tilt. And they’re not even the biggest contributors to the liberal bias that has dominated media coverage of the presidential race.

The bias has been so massive, palpable, and unprecedented that the scales have begun to fall from the eyes of a few stalwarts of the media establishment. Obama, Mark Halperin of Time noted last week, “has been covered as a candidate, rather than as an incumbent whose record needs to be scrutinized.” As you might suspect, this coincides neatly with the president’s reelection strategy.

The Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman has suggested the media have all but given the president a free ride. “Obama was such a cool and uplifting story to so many in the media in 2008 that they have essentially ceded ground to him that they have yet to reclaim,” Fineman wrote. The president has campaigned “without having to seriously and substantively defend his first-term promises or shortcomings, and without having to say much, if anything, about what, if anything, he might do substantially differently if he is fortunate enough to win again.”

The most explosive criticism of press bias has come from Patrick Caddell, the former pollster and adviser to Democrats George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, and Gary Hart. “We have a political campaign where, to put the best metaphor I can on it, the referees on the field are sacking the quarterback of one team, tripping up their runners, throwing their bodies in front of blockers, and nobody says anything,” Caddell said in a speech.

If you hadn’t guessed, the refs are the media, their victims Romney and Republicans. No fan of Romney, Caddell said Obama is protected by the media. Any other president who flew to Las Vegas for a fundraiser hours after the killing of the U.S. ambassador in Libya would have been “crucified,” he said. But Obama wasn’t. “It should have been the equivalent, for Barack Obama, of George Bush’s ‘flying over Katrina’ moment,” Caddell said. “But nothing was said at all and nothing will be said.”

Coverage of the Obama administration’s response to the Libyan attack also reflects the media’s double standard. Within 24 hours, Pentagon and intelligence officials had concluded the assault on the Benghazi consulate was an act of terrorism planned for the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, according to numerous reports. Yet five days later, Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, insisted it “began spontaneously” as a reaction to the Cairo demonstrations against a “hateful video.” White House press secretary Jay Carney continued to say the same.

An obvious question arises, or at least should. Was there a cover-up? If we had a Republican president—or even a Democratic president not named Obama—the press would be pursuing that possibility with great intensity. And the national news would be focused on efforts of the president and his aides to deflect blame for the eruption of assaults on American embassies in Libya and across the Middle East. But in Obama’s case, this hasn’t happened.

Kirsten Powers of the Daily Beast is one of the few journalists to doubt the administration’s motives. Its spin doesn’t make sense, she wrote, “unless it is seen as a deliberate attempt to mislead Americans into believing al Qaeda has been decimated, as President Obama has been known to assert.” But “most of the media herd was fretting” about Mitt Romney’s taxes, she added, thus too busy to probe a far bigger story that might embarrass Obama.

In the treatment of Romney and Obama, the double standard has become habitual. The hunt for gaffes is the defining trait of the media in regard to Romney. But the most egregious gaffe by Obama this year—“You didn’t build that”—was ignored for four days and reported only after the conservative press had created a mini-firestorm over the comment.

In September, Romney innocently joked in answer to a reporter’s question. “Look at those clouds. It’s beautiful. Look at those things.” This was turned into a running gag “for no other reason than to make Romney seem wooden,” wrote Gawker’s John Cook. “Imagine if Obama’s every ‘heh’ or ‘uuuhh’ made it into his quotes.”

Media “fact checkers,” too, have been notoriously one-sided, to the detriment of Republicans. Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican convention was flyspecked in a novel way: He was faulted not for what he said but for what he didn’t say. Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s constant stream of misstatements, goofy comments, and gaffes are routinely tolerated. “From insensitively telling a wheelchair-bound state senator to ‘stand up’ to not recognizing how many letters there are in the word ‘jobs,’ the media have let Biden get away with gaffes that would have gotten GOP VP picks pilloried,” says Geoffrey Dickens of the Media Research Center.

Several months ago, a journalist with four decades of experience and I discussed the matter of media bias in the election. We agreed it would probably be worse than ever. And it has been. But we never figured it would be this bad and, a month before Election Day, still getting worse.

Inside, the transcripts from last night's award ceremony held in New York City by PJ Media and The New Criterion. Update: High-def video of the speeches now online at the Tatler. byRoger L Simon

BioOctober 11, 2012 - 12:00 am WHY A DURANTY PRIZE?

What are we doing here? A couple of years ago Roger Kimball and I came up with the idea that The New Criterion and PJ Media should join forces to give an annual prize in honor — or dishonor, as the case may be — of the somewhat notorious Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times between 1922 and 1936, Walter Duranty.

I say “somewhat notorious” because not too many people outside the insular media world know who he was — but they should. To review for those in this room — most of whom do know — for some fourteen years Walter Duranty, then the most famous and respected foreign correspondent in the world — also, as it happens, a Brit — whitewashed the repressive evil deeds of the Soviet Union, leading to that country’s recognition by none other than Franklin D. Roosevelt, while winning a 1932 Pulitzer Prize for his efforts.

He did this whitewashing most prominently in the case of the Ukrainian Holodomor: the forced starvation of between 1.2 and 12 million ethnic Ukrainians, depending on whose estimates you believe. In other words, a lot of people. Duranty called that genocide “an exaggeration and malignant propaganda” in the newspaper of record. He also covered up the show trial of the British engineers who were tortured into falsely confessing that they were trying to sabotage Stalin’s Five-Year Plan … and similar events … all the time excusing those Soviet misdeeds with what became his personal mantra: “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.”

Meanwhile, he fiercely attacked those who dared criticize him, particularly the brave Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who risked his life to report on the Holodomor, and the British author Malcolm Muggeridge, who returned the compliment by calling Duranty: “The greatest liar I have met in fifty years of journalism.”

Virtually the same year he was winning his Pulitzer, Duranty was reassuring Soviet authorities that he would allow them to vet all reports about their country before they appeared in The New York Times — effectively making that newspaper a U.S. branch of Pravda, for a time anyway.

So why did Walter Duranty do all this? What motivated him to write this way, to lie so flagrantly seemingly without conscience?

That was the primary question that compelled my wife Sheryl Longin and me when we started to do research for our stage play The Party Line, in which Duranty is one of the main characters and of which you have a copy tonight.

Our assumption, like most people, was that Duranty was driven by ideology. The line about the eggs and the omelet sounds suspiciously like a folksy version of: “The ends justify the means.”

But it turned out not to be true. Duranty wasn’t much of a leftist at all. In fact, on several occasions he dismissed communism as a system suitable only for the East, for primitive Russians who craved and needed a strong leader like Comrade Joe, and as something that wouldn’t work in the West.

No, Duranty’s motives were far more personal and modern. Even postmodern.

Dr. Johnson famously told us: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money” — making a lot of bloggers blockheads, but never mind. For Duranty it was money, but it was more than that. No, he wasn’t a communist, although communists certainly used him. He was instead a bohemian of his time, a friend and follower of the Satanist Aleister Crowley, steeped in sex, drugs, and rock and roll before there was any rock and roll, who was snatched from the absinthe bars of Paris to be the Moscow correspondent for The New York Times.

A modern narcissist par excellence, Duranty did what he did for power and acclaim, to be the man in Moscow, the most listened to correspondent on the most important story of his time. To be feted at the Waldorf Astoria — which he was. To be hugely famous, or to borrow the title of Leo Braudy’s book, for The Frenzy of Renown … Vanity Fair, if you will.

In that way he is like our award winners tonight — although perhaps he went a bit further. Like Duranty, none of them are communists, at least as far as I know. But they certainly lust after Vanity Fair, to one degree or another. They have allowed their desire to be chic, to be outrageous or modern and trendy, to be popular kids with the political in-crowd, to overshadow everything they do and to warp their writing beyond the normal bias into outright distortion and propaganda. They should be a lesson to all of us.

And a warning to the public.

A recent Pew Poll showed public dissatisfaction with the mass media has reached what Pew called a “fresh high,” with 60 percent of Americans saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. Personally, I wonder who the forty percent are. But again, never mind.

We hope the Duranty Prize, acting as a warning, will do its little bit to correct that.

Before I relinquish the podium, a word about our methods. Some months ago, PJ Media and The New Criterion publicized this prize and solicited nominations from our readerships, which then were vetted by a committee of professional writers and journalists, some of whom are with us tonight: Peter Collier, Cliff May, Ron Radosh, Glenn Reynolds, Claudia Rosett, and the two Rogers — Kimball and Simon. We received over 150 different nominations, but ended up hewing remarkably close to the recommendations of our readerships. We abjured only one of the top four nominees — NBC for its selective editing in the Trayvon Martin case, because we could not determine culpability. We have learned, however, that NBC is being sued in the case, so that will be adjudicated in the courts — unless the network settles, of course.

So now, on to our prizes.

SECOND RUNNER-UP by Ron Radosh

Radosh: Today, it is my privilege to present the Second Runner-up Walter Duranty award to Andrew Sullivan, the writer and blogger for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Sullivan is worthy of the award for three specific themes which recur in his writing.

The first is his solitary fight on what he considers one of the most horrendous crimes committed against human beings — in this case, on male babies. I refer of course to what Sullivan calls “genital mutilation,” or as most of us refer to it, “circumcision.”

In the past few weeks, he has returned to the issue many times. In the face of medical evidence and major scientific studies that prove the worthiness and health benefits of circumcision, Sullivan offers the following reason why he believes the practice developed: “Foreskins,” he writes, “are much harder to keep clean in dusty and arid places like deserts.”

Judaism and Islam are “desert religions,” and thus religious belief led us to institute a barbaric practice that deprives a child of what human evolution wrought, without his permission. Parents, then, have been engaged in mutilation of their own sons without giving it a thought.

The second reason Andrew Sullivan deserves the prize is for his neverending and relentless crusade to prove that Sarah Palin was not the mother of her Down Syndrome baby, Trig.

As he wrote one year ago, the failure of the media to expose this truth is as important as its failure “to challenge the facts about the rush to war against Iraq.” Acknowledging that he does not know whom the mother is, or indeed whether or not Palin is actually Trig’s mother, Sullivan writes: “If Palin has lied about this, it is the most staggering, appalling deception in the history of American politics.” Considering that the list of deceptions and cover-ups in most observers’ lexicon includes events like Watergate, or the failure of the Roosevelt administration to let the truth be known about Soviet responsibility for the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn, Andrew Sullivan’s conception of what allows one to describe Palin’s would-be lie in such dramatic terms defies imagination.

As he confesses, “only Joe McGinnis seems to give a damn.” As most of us know, McGinnis’ book on Palin was a complete bomb. He had no revelations of worth, and every reviewer trashed it — for good reasons. One of those reasons was that McGinnis revealed himself to be Sullivan’s only backer and a fellow Trig birther, thereby ending any credibility he was thought to have.

Third, Sullivan deserves the award for being Barack Obama’s greatest cheerleader — a stance appreciated by the president, who told the press that he regularly reads Sullivan’s blog. Only once was Sullivan critical of the president — when, after Obama’s recent speech to the UN, Sullivan complained that the president appeared to be supportive of Israel because of an apparent threat to its existence from Iran. After all, Sullivan wrote: “There is only one nuclear power in the Middle East and it … has launched several pre-emptive wars on its neighbors near and far.”

If you have any doubts about what Sullivan thinks of Israel, his answer came in a column he wrote only a few days ago: “We give the Israelis everything they ask for and they give the U.S. nothing in return. In fact, they have operated as a foe, not friend, greeting Obama with the Gaza assault, deliberately destroying Obama’s Cairo’s outreach to the Arab-Muslim world with their settlement policy, confirming every conspiracy theorist in the Middle East.” With Netanyahu as prime minister, he concludes: “Israel is not our ally.” Anyone wanting evidence for how much Andrew Sullivan is outside the consensus about the relationship between the U.S. and Israel should look no further.

Finally, we must also cite Sullivan’s over-the-top cover story for Newsweek on Obama. In his eyes, the president is a conciliator of the center willing to work with Republicans, but foiled by right-wing Republicans bent only on his destruction. He does not refer to Bob Woodward’s new book, in which Woodward reveals Obama as a chief executive who eschewed cooperation across the aisle and sought instead to implement an unpopular health care program without any Republican support. Reading his words, our PJ Media colleague Richard Fernandez commented that Sullivan’s paragraphs: “ … are destined for greatness. It leaves one slack-jawed, unable to credit the words on the page. You have to read it twice to make sure you weren’t hallucinating.”

Watching the first presidential debate, Andrew Sullivan blogged: “Romney has taken charge, even as Obama has spoken more,” managing to make the issue one of the “status-quo versus change dynamic.” Romney, he wrote, “is kicking the president’s ass.” As for his closing statement, Sullivan called it: “F…… sad, confused and lame.” Obama, he said, “may have even lost the election tonight.”

Hence, should Romney win the election, Andrew Sullivan’s worst nightmare would come true, and he would then receive an award that might cause him even more discomfort than the one he is receiving tonight.

FIRST RUNNER-UP by Roger Kimball

Kimball: The selection committee of the 2012 Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity is delighted to award its commendation and second-place prize to Bob Simon for his supremely untruthful report “Christians of the Holy Land,” which aired last April on CBS’s storied news show 60 Minutes.

Expert practitioners of the art of mendacity from the time of the sophist Callicles have advised their pupils, when telling a lie, to make it a big one. This Mr. Simon did with consummate bravado. Not for him the subtle misrepresentation, the quiet fudging of a fact, the deft deployment of misleading innuendo. No, Bob Simon started with a doozy: the “one place where Christians are not suffering from violence” in the Middle East, he reports, “is the Holy Land.”

Who knew? Yes, he admits, Muslims are persecuting Christians — and Jews, too, of course — in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, but in and around the birthplace of Jesus, Christians are unmolested by Muslims. Nevertheless, they are fleeing the Holy Land in droves. This puzzles Mr. Simon. He took the formidable resources of CBS and went with 60 Minutes to the Holy Land to find out why.

We on the Committee of the Duranty Prize were surprised at Bob Simon’s surprise — or what might more accurately be called his feigned surprise. For surely his in-depth, on-the-ground, walk-the-streets-and-interview-colorful-natives investigation uncovered what is patent to even a cursory examination of the facts about the persecution of Christians by Muslim Palestinians.

We think, for example, of the at least 14 homes of Christian Palestinians that were burnt to the ground by a Muslim mob in 2005 in the West Bank because a Christian man was dating a Muslim woman. What provocation!

We think also of that catalogue, assembled by Church leaders and reported by the London Telegraph, of the nearly 100 incidents of abuse perpetrated, in the words of one commentator, by an “Islamic fundamentalist mafia against Palestinian Christians.” Comparing the tone and substance of “Christians of the Holy Land” with the historical reality, the Committee instantly understood that in Bob Simon we had a practitioner of journalist untruthfulness worthy of comparison with his great precursor, Walter Duranty.

The Committee was also deeply impressed by the breadth and versatility of Bob Simon’s mendacity. For not only did Mr. Simon blithely deny the reality of Arab violence against Christians in the Holy Land, he also skillfully and brazenly laid the blame for Christians’ fleeing the area at the feet of the Israelis — as if Israel’s policy of self-defense precipitated the exodus of Christians from the Holy Land.

Mr. Simon also blatantly misrepresented the character of the documents he drew upon for evidence. He suggested, for example, that the so-called Kairos Document, a statement issued by a group of left-leaning Palestinian Christian pastors in 2009, was a blueprint for peace, when in fact it is a noxious specimen of anti-Israel propaganda that also whitewashed Palestinian acts of terrorism as “legal resistance,” a description that other Christian groups have rightly rejected as “repugnant.”

Bob Simon furthermore followed anti-Israeli Palestinian propaganda in falsely describing the nature of the security barrier that protects Bethlehem. He said that it “completely surrounds” the city, transforming it into “an open-air prison.” But as he must know from the evidence of his own eyes, the barrier lies to the north and west of the city only.

In the course of his report, Bob Simon interviews and rudely baits Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., who told him the “major duress” on Christians in the West Bank comes from Muslims. In response, Simon trotted out a Christian Palestinian businessman who denied it — but whose very livelihood depends on the good will of Muslim Palestinians. As one commentator for the Committee for Accuracy for Middle East Reporting in America asked: “Did Simon really expect to get [this] prominent businessman with a lot to lose … to admit to problems with the Muslim majority in Palestinian society in an on-camera conversation with two other people sitting next to him? Is this what passes for investigative reporting at 60 Minutes?”

On a personal note, I would like to register the fond place that 60 Minutes occupies in my memory. I do not much watch that or any other television news show these days, but in years past my wife and I would often spend Sunday evening with Bill and Pat Buckley who lived near us in Connecticut. No Sunday evening could proceed without taking in 60 Minutes together before dinner. I found the segments sometimes informative, occasionally tendentious, but no episode I recall commanded the breathtaking mendacity displayed by Bob Simon’s piece of anti-Israeli propaganda masquerading as concerned journalism.

“Christians of the Holy Land” is a textbook case of deploying the trappings and authority of objective reporting in order to further the ends of ideology. Bob Simon, though unworthy of the canons of responsible journalism intermittently upheld at CBS, is nevertheless a flagrantly successful embodiment of the spirit of mendacity that the Walter Duranty Prize was founded to commemorate. Congratulations, Bob Simon, on your award. You richly deserve it.

DURANTY PRIZE WINNER by Claudia Rosett

Rosett: Good evening, and fair warning. What you are about to hear will not endear any of us to the fashion police.

Choosing the winner of the first Walter Duranty prize at first seemed daunting. As you have just heard, there were a great many richly qualified contenders. But as our prize committee worked through the entries, there was one dispatch that stood out. Not only did it exemplify the Duranty spirit, but it did so in ways so Potemkin, so self-absorbed and so extravagantly intent on peddling terror-linked dictatorship as an exercise in elegance and good taste, that we knew we had a winner.

This story was a joint accomplishment of writer and editor, so it is a shared award. The selection committee is pleased to bestow the Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity on reporter Joan Juliet Buck and editor Anna Wintour, for their combined feats of on-site reporting, headline packaging, impeccable timing, and fearless dismissal of the truth in Vogue magazine’s astounding March 2011 cover story: “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert.”

Styled as a profile of the first lady of Syria, Asma al-Assad, this article was a paragon of propaganda — a makeover of the Assad dictatorship, presenting Asma as the human face of President Bashar al-Assad’s rule: “glamorous, young and very chic.”

Reported and published on the verge of the Syrian uprising and bloody government crackdown that began early last year, in which to date more than 30,000 people have died, “Rose in the Desert” glossed over the horrific realities of Syria’s despotism — which were abundantly evident even before the 2011 carnage, at least to anyone who cared to browse the reams of human rights reports and terror cases.

Instead, Vogue showcased as a breathless scoop a portrait of Syria’s ruling couple as a pair of classy and benevolent aristocrats; the kind of couple any self-respecting member of the global elite could admire and endorse without violating standards of either morality or the latest trends in Parisian footwear.

Ms. Buck, for whom Vogue obtained extraordinary access to the Assads, gushed about Asma as “the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies … breezy, conspiratorial, and fun … a thin long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement.” Ms. Buck treated her readers to visions of Asma waking at dawn to begin her charitable rounds, including her campaign urging millions of young Syrians to engage in “active citizenship.” There were vignettes of Asma flying around Syria in a French-built corporate jet, or careening through traffic behind the wheel of a plain SUV, en route to museums, schools, and orphanages, a study in “energetic grace,” deftly accessorized with little more than a necklace of Chanel agates; shoes and Syrian silk tote bag by French designer Christian Louboutin.

Then there was Asma at home, with her husband and three young children, in their thoroughly modern apartment, where Asma herself, dressed in jeans, t-shirt, and old suede stiletto boots, answers the front door, and whips up fondue for lunch. This was a presidential dwelling, as reported by Ms. Buck, where neighbors freely peered in and dropped by; a household “run on wildly democratic principles” where Asma explains: “We all vote on what we want.”

In this wildly democratic household, the dictator of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, makes his low-key entrance as “the off-duty president,” wearing jeans, playing with his children, and praising his previous profession of ophthalmology as one he chose because “there is very little blood.”

This is the husband, we learn, to whom the dazzling, urbane, London-born Asma says she is grateful, because in wooing her away from her narrow career as a banker to become the first lady of Syria, he gave her back something she had lost — the chance to experience the world around her.

So, what was that world around her? What about the Assad regime’s dynastic grip on power, maintained even in Syria’s relatively calm moments by a long record of terrorist bombings, assassinations, and brutal domestic repression? What about the jailing and torture doled out for years to Syrian dissidents who dared demand anything remotely resembling the “democratic principles” attributed to the Assad household? What about the iron rule with which the same Assad regime that bankrolled Asma’s taste for Louboutin and Chanel had beggared the Syrian people? What about the use of the medieval torture rack in Syria’s prisons, the collaboration with Iran, the terrorists bunking down in the capital, and the North Koreans testing missiles out back?

In the Duranty tradition, Ms. Buck did not completely ignore the troubling aspects of Assad’s regime. Much as Duranty in his day reported that Ukrainians, then starving to death under communist rule, had “shortages,” Ms. Buck noted that in modern Syria, the “shadow zones” were “dark and deep.” Observing that Syria, when she went there in late 2010, had a reputation as the safest country in the Middle East, Ms. Buck speculated this was “possibly” due to the pervasive state surveillance. The Assad regime’s resident terrorists she stitched into her story as a dash of color: there were Hezbollah souvenir ashtrays in the souk, and you could “spot the Hamas leadership racing through the bar of the Four Seasons.”

But all that, implied Ms. Buck, might be changing under the rule of the vibrant, open, glamorous, caring, wildly democratic, and ever-so-chic Assads.

Such an article would have been a monstrous travesty at any stage of Assad’s rule. But with remarkable timing — for which we must credit editor-in-chief Anna Wintour — Vogue packaged “A Rose in the Desert” as the cover story of its March 2011 issue. The magazine hit the stands and the story hit the internet as the uprisings of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya were spreading to Syria.

With Syrians engaging in rather more active citizenship than Asma, in her charity works, apparently had in mind, the Assad regime tried to suppress the uprising by killing its own fellow citizens — shooting, shelling, jailing, torturing, and murdering even children. Unlike in Duranty’s day, thanks to modern technology it did not take long for these horrors to hit the headlines. Vogue’s paean to the Assads was abruptly exposed as one of modern journalism’s most mortally embarrassing makeovers.

With instincts worthy of the old Soviet politburo, or for that matter, the Assad dictatorship, Vogue’s initial response was neither to apologize nor to correct the record, but simply to delete the article from its web site.

Though the tale doesn’t quite end there.

Both Ms. Buck and Ms. Wintour have since recanted the article. Under some circumstances, that might have disqualified them from the Duranty Prize. But in both cases, the recanting was not so much an apology as a justification, an approach so self-involved that it meets in spades the criterion outlined by Roger Simon of “modern narcissism par excellence.”

This past June, well over a year after publishing “A Rose in the Desert,” Ms. Wintour finally released a statement that was largely about deflecting blame. Vogue, she explained, had entertained high hopes for the Assad regime, but “as the terrible events of the past year and a half unfolded in Syria, it became clear that its priorities and values were completely at odds with those of Vogue.”

The month after that — and more than 16 months after the now infamous article — Ms. Buck finally published her own recantation of sorts. To her credit, she denounced the Assads, deplored the carnage in Syria, and tipped out a litany of damning details observed while visiting the Assads but omitted from her original article.

But to call it a full-throated apology would be inaccurate. Ms. Buck’s deepest sympathies seemed reserved for herself.

Writing in Newsweek under the headline “Mrs. Assad Duped Me: My notorious interview with Mrs. Assad, the first lady of hell,” Ms. Buck said she was initially reluctant to take on the Syria assignment, but did so at the urging of her editors at Vogue. Plus, a 2008 article in the British Conde Nast Traveller had described the “increasing hipness” of Damascus, and by 2010, Syria’s status, wrote Ms. Buck, was oscillating between “untrustworthy rogue state and new cool place.” In taking the road to Damascus, Ms. Buck was following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Representative Nancy Pelosi, Senator John Kerry, Sting, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Francis Ford Coppola, as well as a public relations firm, Brown Lloyd James, hired by Mrs. Assad, which arranged the Vogue interview.

For the Vogue cover story that then emerged, Ms. Buck blamed everyone and everything from Vogue to the Assads to her own apparently inescapable work ethic: “I didn’t want to write this piece. But I always finished what I started.” By her account, Vogue’s editors overrode her prepublication misgivings, and then asked her not to talk about the article. Ms. Buck dutifully kept her silence until after Vogue had declined, some nine months later, to renew her contract. Cast adrift, she lamented in Newsweek that she had become a victim: “There was no way of knowing that this piece would cost me my livelihood and end the association I had had with Vogue since I was 23.”

Given Vogue’s original enthusiasm for the project, we can understand Ms. Buck’s shock when she was dropped by her long-time editors. But did she, and they, really have no clue from the get-go that their joint concoction, “A Rose in the Desert,” was a marvel of journalistic mendacity?

In sum, for their stalwart efforts first to cast Syria’s dictatorship as a fashion statement, and then to cover — or erase — their tracks in ways so self-serving that even now they continue to mislead, we congratulate the winners of the Walter Duranty Prize, Anna Wintour and Joan Juliet Buck.

At least a half-dozen professors who gave political donations to President Obama have been quoted in news articles opining about his administration and the 2012 race for the White House.

The findings of The Hill’s months-long investigation come as Republicans have been crying foul, alleging a media bias for Obama and against Mitt Romney.

The Hill cross-checked academics who have been quoted in news articles with Obama’s donor list and eliminated those who worked in prior Democratic administrations. The half-dozen professors detailed in this article do not mention their political affiliations in their bios online. A similar search for Romney donors did not yield any results.

The scholars say they didn’t tell reporters that they had donated to Obama, but would have had they been asked. It is not common practice for journalists to inquire about such political donations, however.

Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute says journalists should ask about political contributions: “Reporters are trying to get an independent viewpoint. Increasingly, the audience is demanding to know how [reporters] get information. The audience would like to know this information."

By Katrina TrinkoOctober 17, 2012 10:39 A.M. Comments 232If you want more time to get your message out in debates, it’s good to be a Democrat.

According to the CNN debate clock, President Obama spoke at greater length than Mitt Romney during both debates, as did Vice President Biden during his debate with Paul Ryan. In the first debate, Obama spoke for 3 minutes, 14 seconds more than Romney — which means he got 8 percent more talking time than Romney. In last night’s debate, Obama spoke for 4 minutes and 18 seconds longer than Romney, giving him 11 percent more talking time. Obama talked for 52 percent of the time when either man had the floor, while Romney talked for 47 percent.

During the vice presidential debate, the gap wasn’t as wide: Biden spoke for 1 minute, 22 seconds more than Ryan. Still, that gave Biden 3 percent more speaking time than Ryan.

I saw nothing on this forum about the time allowed to Obama or Romney in the wake of the first debate. Perhaps it was a non-issue since Obama got his ass kicked? But now, somehow it matters to you. Really?!? Now. Sounds like revisionist history to me.

I saw nothing about the time allowed to Biden/Ryan. Perhaps it was a non-issue because A) it was the VP debate, and those don't matter and B) because Biden had enough time to make his Libya gaffe that WAS talked about on this forum.

Now I see it, in the wake of the most recent debate. Perhaps this is because A) Obama showed up this time, which seems odd to say given the VAST gap in the time he was given by Lehrer. Shit, I thought he wasn't even there, but now I feel differently. Maybe he won the first debate after all? I mean, he must have with ALL THAT TIME. B) Mitt still had enough time to make statements that overtook the memes for the day and C) You still dislike/distrust the party choice of Romney? Where is the substantive discussion of the time he spent in the debate?

Is all this talk of Candy's size because she wouldn't fit in Mitt's binder?

The time difference in the first and the second is starting to accumulate when it is so blatant in the third and when it all goes the same direction. The time was crucial in the third because nearly all of Obama's time from my point of view was spent making either false or misleading statement about his opponent or false and misleading statements about his own record. Time is needed to rebut these and still answer the primary question of him in the debate, what would a Romney administration look like.

I did not notice Bigdog use the word 'professional' associated with the performance Candy, though I may have missed it. Maybe we all agree here, except for the noted digression.

I wrote notes to myself throughout the debate and after question 6, I wrote that she was trying to keep order. By question 9, by my count, she had horribly interjected herself into the debate as a participant. She asked Gov Romney, "Why have you changed your mind?" on ak-47s, covering for a rebuttal point she saw the President miss. Really? What pressing federal issue is out there about guns right now other than the dead Mexicans and US border guard scandal. Looked to me like she was trying to help Obama carry Colorado using the movie theater shooting for political gain and Obama missed his opening. She needed this point made to show why she chose the question.

Then the "self-deport" followup, completely uncalled for, and all the other one sided interruptions. "SIT DOWN GOV ROMNEY." When did she say sit down Mr. President. It was a moment of ugliness. Are they not allowed to stand even during their opponent's time??

She made NO attempt to stop applause that real moderators don't tolerate. The one-sided applause started to give away the phoniness of the setup; she was the one who picked the people by knowing their questions. Little did we know who was applauding.

Then the doozy, sticking her nose in to call Romney a liar after all the misinformation she had tolerated to that point. And she was wrong on her facts.UPDATE: On that point the President and the moderator seemed to be openly collaborating.

That drew the biggest applause. Turns out it was Michelle Obama leading the applause. The television audience did not know that. Instead of nipping it in the bud she blushed because it was she they were applauding. Does the moderator have no control over the partisans allowed in the room? If not, why are they allowed in the room?

She made a promise at the beginning that time to followup would be available at the end, but that wasn't true. Pundits outside the room were keeping track of time discrepancies and she wasn't. Instead she was looking for her openings to get herself in on one more big play for her team. Did someone see it differently than that?!?

A professional hockey ref calls offside on Wayne Gretszky the same as he calls it on a first year unknown. This lady didn't. This replacement ref displayed her team's uniform and threw herself into it instead of moderating. Participants get judged on style, not just substance.

Small time differences wouldn't normally matter except that our media and debate scorers count any lie or deception that is not immediately refuted as a debate point won. And if refuted, they still score the point to the liar/deceiver because he had successfully put his opponent on defense.

Speaking of partisans, we have Bob Schieffer coming up next.

The Republican party and candidates may have signed on to a lineup of lefties for moderators because they were offered no other choice. Out here in the heartland we did not give up our right to whine about Washington media lefties trying to control the process.

"...she wouldn't fit in Mitt's binder?"

Romney does exactly what every liberal would want any employer to do on pay equity. He sought out, found and hired more women at senior high paying jobs, and Obama didn't. For that, what do they do? Thank Romney, honor him? No, ridicule. Make fun of the process, or a word missing in a time limited sentence used to describe the process. I assume he referred to binders of women's applications or resumes. - Hey guys, we found another shiny object! - Every minute that you visualize the binders of women you are not seeing 23 million unemployed, 47 million and still growing numbers of people dependent on food stamps and 1 in 6 in poverty.

'That's enough'. 'Sit down Gov. Romney.' Most people give their dog more respect.

"This website has taken the video of the debate and reviewed extensively the Bengazi question. It appears that the writer is correct in determining that Obama knew who the questioner by sight, prior to the questioner even standing up to identify himself. The writer also has reviewed the question asked and makes a pretty good argument that the wording of the question, "enhanced security", is something that most people would not have used. Heck, I would not have asked the question in the manner that he did.

"Also, there are reports that Crowley was at the White House on Sunday.

"I cannot confirm this. Add, there are reports that Crowley's husband might have an appointed office in government. But Crowley has never identified who her husband is, so who knows?"

They were very clear at the beginning that the questions were known only to Crowley and her staff. If she violated that there would be quite a consequence for her - to move up even higher in Washington media social circles.

"I did not notice Bigdog use the word 'professional' associated with the performance Candy, though I may have missed it. Maybe we all agree here, except for the noted digression."

I wonder why? Perhaps because I didn't. Perhaps, I went as far as posting the three links I again post below. Don't believe me (and why should you, really)? Take a look at the October 17 morning posts on the 2012 presidential thread.

It does bug me though, when you guys refuse to see that Romney has performed MUCH AS YOU EXPECTED him to when he was just "a" candiate rather than "the" candidate. There is much questioning on this forum questioning things like Romney's conservative creds and his inability to connect with voters. Then he doesn't, and you blame someone else. As for MY binder commetn, it wasn't me that brought Candy's size into the discussion. You were right that it diminishs from the quality of the discussion. I am sorry the connection was clear in print than in my head.

"Turns out it was Michelle Obama leading the applause." Source?

You are wrong on many things, Doug.

First, "A professional hockey ref calls offside on Wayne Gretszky the same as he calls it on a first year unknown." Always? There has long been discussion around the NFL that QBs like Manning and Brady get away with things that others don't. I wonder what the strike zone is for players in MLB. It is NOT always the same.

Second, "He sought out, found and hired more women at senior high paying jobs...". There is a fair amount of discussion going on about this. In fact, it appears that the binders of information were NOT sought out by him, but were made independently and would have been given to the winner of the election, no matter it was.

"It does bug me though, when you guys refuse to see that Romney has performed MUCH AS YOU EXPECTED him to when he was just "a" candiate rather than "the" candidate. There is much questioning on this forum questioning things like Romney's conservative creds and his inability to connect with voters. Then he doesn't, and you blame someone else"

Well, I can speak only for myself, but I suspect none of us are surprised at Romney-- but I am not seeing any inconsistency in our noting when the pravdas put their fingers on the scales , , ,

Pointing out the influence of the moderators is fine. The inconsistency is the singular focus, shifting from Romney, when that was the previous concern. Now... there is a new "shiny object" to use GM's (I think) apt description. No blame for Romney... when ALL the credit was given to him (or Obama's terrible first performance).

Jim Lehrer gave Obama extra time to waffle, grunt, fumble his way and now you are frustrated???

Like most here, I did not want Romney as the nominee for a variety of reasons and our concerns in goodly measure have been ratified. Romney has not run a very good campaign. Like most/all here I strongly prefer Romney to Obama. Like most/all here I think much of our media to be a cabal of progressive pravda conspiracy on behalf of Baraq-- and would submit that this line of thought has exceedingly ample evidence provided in this thread.